In these times of tightened budgets, IT executives are finding it more important than ever to justify the costs of providing IT services and call attention to the value of the services their teams provide.

A recent announcement from Gartner at its symposium in Barcelona in November 2011 forecast an increase in IT and marketing budgets between now and 2017. This trend is part of an overall progression, propelled by initiatives like ITIL, towards aligning IT organization with users and service provision.
“IT management and marketing” covers the activities that foster the visibility of the steps IT teams are taking in that direction. ip-label’s consulting team assists you in setting up quality dashboards that include easy-to-read indicators with a view to communicating with business management.

What should a quality dashboard show?
Indicators should make sense to business managers and provide insight into:
- the technical performance of services: for example, the end-to-end execution of a sales transaction, whether online (e-retail) or internal, for the company’s sales force. Externalized services (Google mail, etc.) should also be accounted for in order to maintain and assert IT management’s role as the overall driver of IT solutions.
- process performance: users report incidents or send in requests stemming from their experiences with the service. It is therefore also essential to shed light on IT management’s performance in executing feedback management processes.

To this end, precise definition of indicators requires a wide consensus among all players within the IT purview (production, operations, customer support, etc.) as well as among the users (sales, marketing, etc.).

The consulting team at ip-label has expertise not only in the technical solutions required for collecting such data, but also ensures through preliminary meetings that the main issues and objections are taken into account. It then works on formulating specifications and setting up a proof of concept.

Which customers have already decided to set up executive dashboards?

For the FNAC, which conducts business on a Europe-wide scale with regional locations in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, we set up a dashboard at the end of 2011 for communicating on a weekly basis with “Country” users about the operation of web applications. This solution is also based on our “Executive Report” product.

It is worth noting that the inclusion of process metrics (incident management, etc.) is also provided for automatically via web services.
For another customer, which provides automotive services throughout Europe via its network of service stations, we set up a custom “Executive Report” reporting solution in 2011 to communicate with “Country” users about the operation of critical sales and e-mail applications.